This is Star Trek in all its cheesy glory.\u00a0 It starts with Kirk, McCoy and Scotty sitting in a bar leering at a belly dancer.\u00a0 Apparently, the Enterprise is in orbit around an interstellar red-light district.\u00a0 Kirk and McCoy are slobbering over each other talking about other dives they want to visit.\u00a0 Scotty goes for a walk in the foggy night with the belly dancer.<\/p>\n
Anyway, the plot, such as it is, revolves around Scotty being found several different times with a woman with a knife sticking in her.\u00a0 In each case Scotty claims to have amnesia at the moment of the murder.\u00a0 The police administrator is played by John Fiedler, the little bald mousey character actor known for his work in the movie \u201cTwelve Angry Men\u201d and as the voice of Winnie the Pooh\u2019s friend Piglet.\u00a0 In order to get to the bottom of the murders the leader of the planet has his wife perform a s\u00e9ance.\u00a0 She starts moaning and whining about some monstrous deathless evil that kills women and lives off their fear.\u00a0 But suddenly the lights go out and she screams.\u00a0 When the lights come back up Scotty is, of course, holding the woman with a knife in her back and her blood on Scotty\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n
Eventually we find out that the evil entity was Jack the Ripper and he travelled out into the galaxy as humanity expanded out from Earth. \u00a0Based on the clues it is determined that the police administrator is the monster and when discovered he attempts to stab Kirk.\u00a0 Kirk flips him and disarms him and then punches him in the jaw.\u00a0 McCoy checks the killer and declares, \u201cHe\u2019s dead Jim!\u201d\u00a0 But the entity leaves the human body and invades the ship computer.\u00a0 Once in the computer the entity attempts to frighten the crew prior to murdering them.\u00a0 But Spock sets the computer to figuring the exact value of pi.\u00a0 Since pi is a transcendental number apparently the futuristic computer can\u2019t handle the chore and malfunctions.\u00a0 This drives the entity out of the computer and back into his body.\u00a0 Spock injects the creature with a tranquilizer and then transports him into open space with a wide dispersion thus rendering it harmless.<\/p>\n
This episode is wonderfully tacky and even the small touches add to its hokey atmosphere.\u00a0 When the crew is being tranquilized to avoid feeding the creature on their fear Sulu gets this drunken expression that makes you think he\u2019s about to drool on himself.\u00a0 And I think the episode set a record for McCoy saying, He\u2019s\/She\u2019s dead Jim!\u201d\u00a0 I counted three.\u00a0 By the third one he should just have said, \u201cDitto.\u201d\u00a0 But above all, Kirk and McCoy in the belly dancing den of iniquity, slavering over the depravity they plan at the next dive they intend to visit is the high point.<\/p>\n
I give this a score of\u00a0\u00a0 6 \/\/ 10.\u00a0 Shatner\u2019s bad acting lifts this episode to new heights of awful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is Star Trek in all its cheesy glory.\u00a0 It starts with Kirk, McCoy and Scotty sitting in a bar leering at a belly dancer.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[237,4,244,2149,240],"tags":[2150,38,1355,44,309,265,1691,293,154,1692,837,2631],"class_list":["post-11854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-tv-reviews","category-star-trek","category-tv-reviews","tag-gene-roddenberry","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-sci-fi","tag-sci-fi-tv-review","tag-science-fiction","tag-sff-tv-show-reviews","tag-star-trek","tag-tv-review","tag-tv-reviews","tag-william-shatner","tag-wolf-in-the-fold"],"yoast_head":"\n